Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.

I think both the space shuttle program and the International Space Station program have not really lived up to their expectations.

The life expectancy of people going to Mars may be decreased by the higher level of radiation that they receive.

I believe that space travel will one day become as common as airline travel is today. I'm convinced, however, that the true future of space travel does not lie with government agencies -- NASA is still obsessed with the idea that the primary purpose of the space program is science -- but real progress will come from private companies competing to provide the ultimate adventure ride, and NASA will receive the trickle-down benefits.

They didn’t tell me I was going into space until after they locked the shuttle doors and started counting down.

We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way.

Like actors and writers who are on and off again in terms of employment, I had a very unstructured life.